


Further Up and Further In

by hedda62



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-31
Updated: 2012-08-31
Packaged: 2017-11-13 06:20:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/500432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedda62/pseuds/hedda62
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To fill the prompt: <i>You know all those Betan survey ships that go into wormholes and don’t come out? They go to Narnia.</i>  That... says it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Further Up and Further In

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [avanti_90](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avanti_90/pseuds/avanti_90) in the [Bujold_Ficathon_2012](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Bujold_Ficathon_2012) collection. 



> Many thanks to my Betan reader, linman/penwiper26, and to avanti_90 for the delicious prompt.
> 
> To anyone wandering in from the Narnian side: you will have to figure out the Betans for yourself, but there are no real spoilers for Bujold's series. Rated teen for a few bad words, extremely mild suggestions of sexuality, and far too many Dorothy Parker quotes.

The unknown beckoned. An inconsequential distortion of space to the unenlightened, to the crew of the Betan Astronomical Survey ship _Richard Feynman,_ the wormhole radiated novelty and the light of learning.

Of course, most of them wondered about the other side and what might await them there: planets full of strange and wonderful minerals, plants, microscopic creatures and perhaps even complex animal life. Pilot Officer Britta Phelps, having taken temporary command of the ship from her captain, was contemplating another sort of wonder: the imminent journey through the wormhole. Jump pilots were a breed apart, and not because they had holes in their heads, as Britta's brother liked to tease. It was because they had worlds in their heads. Or not worlds exactly, but the infinite variety of what came between worlds. Let the others chase succulents and jellyfish unknown to science, let them charge up mountains and float in the seas of newly-discovered planets. Let them think their adventures miraculous. Britta's consciousness had hurtled through tunnels of fire, spread like a net of twanging sensory receptors across the stars, exploded in blue-green ecstasy of cinnamon and fireflies, heard symphonies played by gods. She'd also had passages that felt like she'd spent thirty years in a dank prison on moldy bread and lukewarm water, with regular beatings. You never knew what it would be like. Britta's friend Robin, who did the Beta-Escobar run on a regular basis, said the journey was different every time; always like coming up through water into a bright sunlit world, but always a new body of water and a new shore to swim to. It had seen swift rivers, vast oceans, lakes of impenetrable depth, and all with no aquatic experience but a swimming pool in Quartz: more than Britta knew of fireflies or prison. A sort of collective consciousness among pilots, the theory went. Britta just thought of it as a gift.

Now, another journey awaited: subjective hours, if she were lucky, days if unlucky, while the rest of the crew experienced a brief dizziness and nausea. This was the fourth jump they'd made in the two-week mission, each stranger than the last, each ripping away more of her sense of self. But she was long past being frightened by the risks of jumps.

And it was time. She put aside all trepidation, all distractions: her itchy throat, herald of a cold coming on; shipboard tensions and feelings about her shipmates; her memories of the last jump. She adjusted the leads and cannulae, ran a quick check to be certain the connections were secure, and directed the ship toward its destiny.

The wormhole was already exerting its seductive power on Britta and hence on the ship. It took tremendous willpower to break away and abort a jump once she'd had a look inside the wormhole, once it had sent out its first tendrils of sensation to brush across her mind and her body. Sometimes the contact came in waves of power, in shocks, in caresses to the pleasure center of her brain; sometimes it roared danger, and that made her desire to enter it even greater. Had a wormhole been her lover, her therapist would have urged her to cut the relationship loose, or at least to assert herself more, lest she risk being swallowed up.

That was, of course, pretty much the point with wormholes.

This one drew her in not with heat and shows of force, but with a chill touch to her brow and the backs of her hands, a gelid soothing of her rough throat, like a generous companion helping her to cool down after a long desert trek. Her nose filled with the scents of peppermint and cloves, and an icy breeze brushed her cheek. She let her muscles go limp, put the space enveloping her ship behind her, and let herself be taken in.

Keeping the ship steady in what, stripped of all illusion, she might have experienced as a light-filled tunnel in space and time, was now an autonomic reflex, which allowed the wormhole's visions to overwhelm her. The scientific journals ignored what they called pilots' hallucinations. Discouraged from discussing them in public forums, the pilots met in bars and murmured to each other of where they'd been and what they'd seen and felt. They didn't drink much alcohol, or indulge in other mind-altering substances, because as long as they were going out into space again, they didn't need to. Nobody really understood jump pilots but other jump pilots. And just possibly wormholes.

Her world-between-worlds smelled green now, like the forest she'd walked through on the last planet they'd found. Two years ago now. Most wormholes led to no place humans could live. This one touched her with hope and frigid fingers, burning as they swept across her skin. She was plunging up through water, just as Robin had described, and the forest scents and sounds embraced her, an earthy taste, leaves whispering in the wind, and then the water again, cold and colder. She curled into herself, shivering.

Then the world cracked into brightness, loud like something had been riven in two. She stared, eyeless. In her years as a jump pilot she'd been red, aqua, magenta, grass-green, a yellow surpassing all the suns, and a thousand other colors.

She'd never before been white.

*

The first thing Lieutenant Jake Goldberg noticed as he regained consciousness was the cold. Cold on his left cheek. And ear. And hand. Pretty much everywhere on his left side. And, less directly, on his right. _Heating systems failed,_ he thought, _or no, all of the systems. Dead in space, and I'm lying on the floor. Or the deck, since it's a ship._ But the surface under him didn't feel like a deck. Not hard enough, and it curved up around his shoulder, as though he'd made a dent in it on landing.

And the chirping he heard was not an alarm or a monitor. It sounded like the bird house at the Silica Zoo. But he wasn't inside; the cold air on his face was fresh. Outdoorsy. Not Beta Colony outdoorsy; not ferocious heat, or the sweaty clime of equatorial Escobar. More like Earth, from what he could remember of his childhood visit there. He'd come home with a whole new wardrobe; his parents hadn't realized that northern Europe was cold in the autumn. They hadn't really known what "autumn" meant, in fact.

It was colder than that, here. This was winter. A planet that had winter. Not Earth: they'd been in another quadrant altogether. He couldn't remember them finding a planet, or landing on one. Crashing, perhaps. He strained his memory, but the last thing he could recall was the beginning of a jump, the unpleasant sensation of tumbling worms in his belly. But he'd been unconscious; sometimes you lost memories when you hit your head.

His head didn't particularly hurt. It was just cold.

He opened his eyes. White.

_Snow._

Snow figured in many tales of old Earth: wolves howling across the frozen lake; jolly penguins; enormous white bears: he'd always gone for the animals, but seldom encountered anything that large later on in his work as an exobiologist. And there were evergreen trees, cut down and brought into houses for festival: an ancient sense of exclusion attached to that. Drops of blood marring the whiteness. Chips of ice in the heart.

Travelers, freezing to death when they lay down to rest in the snow. He'd best be getting up.

And when he lifted his head there were the trees, tens and hundreds of them, dark branches swooping down near to the white ground. His nose was all at once full of their scent. Maria was going to love this, even if the trees looked very Earthlike for a specialist in exobotany. He sat up all the way and looked around.

Maria was nowhere to be seen, but on the ground near him lay Captain Fagan, starting to move and groan, and across the clearing, disturbingly still, was Pilot Officer Phelps.

He struggled to his feet and, shuffling through the loose white fluff of the snow, went to her. She was breathing, but her face was pale, and... shit. Shit. The silver buttons of her pilot's implants were _gone,_ leaving small red wounds on her temples. _Stigmata,_ Jake thought, and then wondered why.

Her earrings were gone too, ripped out of her earlobes. He didn't bother to wear his aboard ship, especially since he wasn't about to get involved with colleagues, but Britta had kept hers in constant display: _unattached, not looking for commitment, too busy for casual flings_. An in-your-face disinterest. Perhaps truthful. Certainly painful to him.

He knelt down to her, examined her for other injuries, shook her gently. Her pulse was steady and she didn't seem to have spinal damage, but she wouldn't wake. And that was as far as Jake's medical skills went. Ben Rosemont, the ship's doctor and assistant engineer, was not in the clearing either. Just as well, Jake thought; Ben was fine with medical emergencies, but he wouldn't react well to this... mysterious abandonment.

"Where is everyone?" came Fagan's voice behind him, echoing his thought. "And where in the universe are we?"

Jake turned his head and looked up, feeling an absurd urge to salute his captain just for being there to take charge. Oh, what the hell. He stood up and snapped his hand to his brow. "I don't know, ma'am," he said.

She was taken aback, but saluted him in return, and the action seemed to give her confidence. "Report, Lieutenant," she said.

"Ma'am. Breathable atmosphere. Increasing cloud cover, less sunlight than when I awoke, and it's... snowing. Yes, I believe that's the proper verb form." White flakes falling out of the sky, melting with little frigid kisses on his face.

"We're in cold weather gear," he realized suddenly and said aloud, touching the heavy sleeve of his jacket. "Not what we were wearing... that is, do you remember trying to land? Deciding to land?" _Anything?_

Fagan shook her head. "The last thing I remember is giving Britta the ship. Is she...?"

"Alive. But..." He indicated Britta's damage, wordlessly. The captain hissed in a breath. "More stable than I'd expect," Jake went on. "But I don't really know. We need to get her somewhere warm. Soon."

They both surveyed the clearing and the apparently endless forest beyond. "Where _are_ we?" Fagan said again.

"I don't know." He seemed to be saying that a lot; it blunted the pretense of military precision. And with the realization of how they were dressed, he'd also recognized that there were no packs in the clearing, and that all his instruments were missing, along with his stunner and comlink. It looked like Fagan didn't have hers either. "Somewhere with snow," he added blankly.

"Oh." Fagan drew in a breath, and then shook her head. Her mouth twisted in response to Jake's inquiring look. "Not Barrayar," she said. "For a moment I... they have snow. But it can't be. We weren't anywhere near..."

"No," Jake agreed. They'd all been shocked by news of the bloody end to the reign of the backward planet's latest emperor. Worse than the Cetagandans, whom they'd managed to defeat (not without Beta's help) in an even bloodier war while Jake had been at university. Barrayar was the last place they'd want to land. And they hadn't, obviously, since they hadn't been near Komarr for the jump. Unless... a new wormhole into Barrayaran space? _No._ He pushed the idea away. "Not Earth either," he said. "Even though--"

"It looks like it," Fagan finished. "It's beautiful, isn't it?" She took in a deep gulp of the fresh air and glanced around. "What do you think the chances of such similar--" Her gaze, fixed on the largest of the evergreen trees, sharpened. "Who's that?"

The dark figure under the tree was moving. Sitting up. Looking at them. They rushed forward together. "Chris!" called Fagan.

Their hermaphrodite shipmate pushed itself to its feet and wavered uncertainly toward them. "What fresh hell is this?" it said.

"The Land of Ice and Snow," Jake found himself saying. "Chris, I'm so glad you're--"

"Hard to kill off. Are we all accounted for?" It glanced around. "Apparently not. What happened?"

They gave it a quick run-down of what they didn't know. Then they did a thorough search of the surrounding forest edge and found no more of their companions. Four survivors, unless the others had... fallen? landed?... in another part of the planet. It would not have to be very far away for them to miss one another. Chris was lacking all its equipment as well. They had essentially nothing beyond the clothes on their backs, and, for some reason, the knives in their belts. No food, no water, no shelter, no way of communicating with their colleagues. Maybe they'd been hit on the head and robbed, but none of them had head injuries, if you didn't count Britta's, and none of them had stun hangovers, either, or the fogginess associated with knockout gas.

Finally, Fagan declared that she would go off and explore, hoping to find shelter, and meanwhile Jake and Chris should do their best to keep Britta warm. She was two steps away on what seemed to be a path into the forest, when a figure appeared on the opposite side of the clearing. An odd silhouette, very odd... and then the creature stepped forward.

Bioengineered, or... oh! Jake's heart leapt at the chance that he would be the one to discover the long-awaited intelligent aliens... that is, if he survived this, if they ever got home... it looked intelligent, if rather surprised... the expression on its unmistakably human face, no, not an alien, but... horns. Furry legs and what must be cloven hoofs.

"Oh, goodness gracious me," it said. " _More_ of you."

*

It had been a long time since Grace Fagan's Survey training, but she remembered clearly the lecture about what to do if they ever encountered intelligent life. Peaceful, unthreatening movements; communicating with gestures; trying to ascertain cultural norms. The creature speaking her own language threw all this out of her head; she rushed back across the clearing in what must have seemed an aggressive manner, and snapped out, "What do you mean, 'more of you'?"

 _We're not the first,_ came the echoing thought. _Who's been here before us? Or... oh. Ben and Maria?_

The creature shrank back a little, and then leaned forward and peered at her. "But more aged," it said. _He_ said, she was pretty sure, given the human male upper body.

"I'm forty-three!" she objected.

"The wearying cares of leadership," Chris said dryly, and the creature's attention shifted.

"And you," he said, "Son of Adam, or... no, Daughter of Eve," clearly having noticed the breasts, "or..."

 _Earth mythology,_ Grace thought, and her brain whirled with possibilities as Chris shot back, "Yes, well, unisexuality isn't normal, it's just common. And I wouldn't talk if I were you, though the bare-chested look in the middle of winter, certainly striking, and even rather--"

"You're a faun," Grace said, interrupting what was sure to be an indiscretion. "Half-man, half-goat, native of the forest. But are we in..." -- time travel? Into a mythological world? -- "in Greece?"

"You're in Narnia," said the faun, "and I am a very bad faun; I've failed to welcome you." He put out a hoof and bowed. "My name is Tumnus. Greetings. It is a cold day for strangers to be abroad, and I have a warm fire and food and drink at my home. Please join me." He bowed at Jake, too, and then he saw Britta. "Oh! Is she--"

"Unconscious," Jake said, "and in desperate need of warmth and medical attention. We accept your offer."

It was an improper usurpation of her role as captain, but Grace had never been a stickler for protocol -- you couldn't be, and last long in Survey -- and while she knew better than to trust Tumnus, she couldn't see any alternative to going with him. In fact, she wanted to go with him. "Yes, thank you, Lieutenant. We should make a stretcher for Britta to lie on, and--"

"I'll carry her," said Jake, and went down on one knee by her side, sliding his arms under her and lifting. She was small, and he was stronger than he looked; hopefully it wasn't far to Tumnus's house.

The faun took the path into the woods, and they followed. After a few minutes' journey through the embracing dark and fragrance of the trees Chris drew close to her side and murmured, "How far away from our landing spot do you think we're going? Because there's seeking out new data and being open-minded about new cultures, and then there's getting irretrievably lost, and I think--"

"Shh," Tumnus warned, glancing back at them. "Spies. The birds, the trees. Best keep quiet."

Grace nodded, and whispered to Chris, "I'm keeping track of the turns. Compass in my head."

Chris snorted gently. "You're an astrocartographer, not a map-sketcher. But I'd follow you anywhere; you know that."

She grinned and strode forward in Tumnus's footsteps.

It was perhaps half a kilometer later, over rough terrain, that they reached a large rock which Tumnus walked straight toward; at the last moment Grace saw the opening, the entrance to a cave. It disturbed her that here in the midst of a lovely forest, and breathable if chilly air, the faun lived underground, as if he belonged to a planet with a punishing climate like Beta's. But once inside it seemed a comfortable home, with dozens of real paper books in leather covers lining the shelves by the wall, and simple furnishings, and oh, a fireplace. Of course, there was a great deal of wood in the vicinity, and fire was a traditional if inefficient means of providing heat, but Grace had only seen personal home fires in vids, and she drew her eyes away with reluctance.

Jake was still holding Britta; he looked about to fall down with fatigue. "Here," said Tumnus, "put her... no, the bedroom is too cold. Help me bring the bedding in by the fire." Chris went to assist, and Jake sank down in an armchair until the mattress and blankets were arranged. Then he laid Britta down as gently as if she were made of glass, and Grace saw clearly the moment when he considered kissing her forehead, and didn't.

 _Ah. I assumed it was Maria he wanted. Better this, considering how she looks at Ben._ And then her attention shifted to Tumnus, who was breathing life into the coals and adding wood to the fire, and then bustling off to fetch a kettle, hanging it on a hook near the flames to heat. "You'll be needing some tea," he said.

When it was prepared, they drank it and ate some cakes, she and Tumnus sitting in chairs and Jake and Chris on footstools. The sanctity of the guest-host relationship was close to universal among Earth-descended cultures, and she was certain that Tumnus's culture was related to her own, no matter how illogical his existence and mythological his appearance. Myths could be based in reality -- dragons from dinosaur bones; that sort of thing -- but her mind spun when she tried to consider how that would work in this case. Tumnus was not the sort to go traveling about in starships. And if the planet had ever been colonized by humans, the record had been lost.

"Tumnus," she said, "you said we weren't the first... people like us you'd seen. Could you--"

"I have had a charming visitor. Twice. A Daughter of Eve, a young girl, named Lucy." He held out a hand a bit more than a meter from the floor. "And I have put myself in danger, by having her as a guest, and by letting her return to her home."

Grace decided to take this one part at a time. "Where was Lucy's home?"

Tumnus looked down. "War Drobe, she said, but I neglected to pursue the matter. I suppose I..."

"What?" Grace asked when his voice trailed off.

"I was trying to protect her from the start, to not discover too much about her. The Witch's power is far-reaching."

"The Witch?"

"The White Witch. She rules Narnia. It is she who has made it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas."

Grace meant to make a comment about weather manipulation technology; what came out instead was, "What's a faun doing celebrating a holiday like that? Or not celebrating, as the case may be."

There was a moment of silence in which Tumnus looked confused and Jake made a sound of swallowed laughter. Finally, Tumnus said, "We hope that Father Christmas will break through the magic someday."

Father Christmas was a god or a saint associated with the ancient festival. The Barrayarans had Father Frost; that tradition had become a fad on Beta for a while after the arrival of Prince Xav. Grace enjoyed giving and receiving gifts and dining with family at what, she assumed, had been the darkest part of Earth's year. Funny how despite the lack of seasons, sufficient illumination, and no risk of famine, the human instinct was to cling together in the dark and kindle light and consume a feast; and funny how centuries after a diaspora, people still clung to the traditions of another world entirely.

What that meant for Narnia, she couldn't say. And she didn't want to believe in magic.

"What else does this Witch do? And why are you afraid of her?" she asked.

"She will turn me to stone if I defy her," said Tumnus. He glanced around, nervous but brave. "I have already defied her, by letting Lucy go. She will send Fenris Ulf to capture me, and he will carry me to the Witch's castle, and... oh dear..."

"Well," said Chris, "it was your lucky day when you met us, then." They all looked at it, and it shrugged. "Sounded like the right thing to say. I'm an engineer, not a herm of action. But who's this Fenris Ulf?"

"Captain of the Witch's secret police," said Tumnus.

"Oh, well never mind then," said Chris, and after a beat added, "No, I'm joking. Not that you wouldn't be better off with a squad of Barrayaran goons; they're more used to that sort of thing. But we'll fight them off nonetheless."

"We have no weapons," Jake said.

"We have no energy weapons," Grace put in. "We have knives, a fireplace poker, and plenty of wood. We have fire." Suddenly she could see herself and her colleagues defending this victim of tyranny in hand-to-hand combat. It was a thrilling, primitive idea, yet her Betan-tuned sensibilities managed to halt her enthusiasm. "Though maybe we could explore other alternatives. This Witch's power seems to be based in her manipulation of the weather. Can we counter that in any way, Chris?"

The herm laughed. "First of all, I thought we had a non-interference directive. But, assuming we've thrown that out the nonexistent window, and that would get my vote, yes, I could provide some rainstorms or cut back on the amount of snow falling _if_ you fetch me a shuttle and some silver iodide or the right sort of bacteria. In the very long term, I might alter the climate through what I'm not going to call terraforming since that clearly isn't the appropriate word. But that's all absurd, under current conditions. I can't change the weather with a belt knife."

It took a deep breath and went on. "I don't know what planet we're on or why we're here. I don't know that this isn't all one enormous hallucination, though frankly I'd hope my hallucinations would take place somewhere much more like the Orb and much less like one of my worst days at work ever, with bonus hairy-legged person. If it's anyone's hallucination, I'd bet it's yours, Captain. It's more to your taste, wouldn't you agree?" Its eyes narrowed with keen focus. "Which is the only reason I agree with your instincts. Let's start making spears and arrows."

Grace stared at her mild-mannered engineer, its usual mocking tone now laced with bravura and daring. She glanced at Jake; he was nodding vigorously. Tumnus looked scared, grateful, and determined. _My gallant gentle knights._ And that was an ancient enough idea to serve.

"Very well," she said. "Make it so."

*

Sitting on the threshold of the cave, Chris drew the knife blade along to the tip of the stake, stripping off another shaving of fresh wood: one in a thousand identical motions it had made in the last hour. The cure for boredom is curiosity, one whom it admired had once said, and the cure for dull repetition was surely a wickedly sharp point.

Not that it was making a point so much as succumbing to inevitability and the will of Grace Fagan. It had watched her, coming through the forest, as she came alive step by step, shoulders releasing as though shrugging off a great weight, gait smoother, eyes darting about with wonder and inquiry. _There is no cure for curiosity._ It could be the Betan Survey motto. And they all spent most of their time away from the old sandbox for a reason, or rather for lots of different reasons. Grace's had been mysterious to Chris for all the years they'd worked together: no unhappy love affair or apparently anything else repelling her from home, including political disdain or inability to follow the rules; reasonable amounts of ambition, but no overwhelming compulsion to _get there first_ by any means; no need to show anyone up in particular. Since Chris had a similar list of negatives in its psychological resume, it had finally concluded that, like itself, Grace simply didn't care for Beta.

Watching her walk through the forest, it had reconsidered. Some people didn't belong on Beta or on any other planet, and they were meant for space, for traveling between. And some people didn't belong on Beta, but did belong somewhere else.

For Grace, it seemed to be Narnia.

Of course, at the moment none of them had much choice. No way to leave and no place to hide, and the fighting would come to them soon, so they'd better be ready. Chris was carving stakes, Jake was strapping Tumnus's knives onto more tree branches to create spears, Grace and Tumnus had finished turning the kitchen inside-out for weaponry and were now practicing with bows and arrows. Britta was still unconscious by the fire.

Chris shot her a glance of affection and worry over its shoulder. It wasn't quite old enough to be her parent, but nevertheless that was how it felt toward her. Protective, and proud. She looked so small and broken, lying there, but jump pilots were a tough lot, and Britta was no exception. She'd come through this. And then... it seemed to Chris that she was one of those who belonged among the stars. If they had no way back into space... there were more ways than the obvious to break a pilot.

But it couldn't think about that now. There were the stakes to carve. It went back to work.

A few minutes later, everyone froze and then looked up in unison. A sound in the forest, distant but getting closer, carried on the wind.

_Howling._

Grace leapt to her feet, bow ready in her hand. Beside her, Tumnus stood equally prepared for battle; they looked like something out of history's crazed dream, and beautiful. Chris got to its feet, somehow discovering a warrior's stance. Jake moved next to it, spear in hand, and passed another to Chris. The stakes were for close work; they'd aim arrows and spears at the policepersons first.

Chris stifled a laugh at the Betaism. The antiquated and sexist "policemen" wouldn't be accurate either. If Tumnus's experience of humans consisted of the four of them and the young Lucy, the Witch's secret police were not-humans. What creatures would a witch hire to do her dirty work? Ghouls? Vampires? Cats?

"Oh dear," it heard Tumnus say as their attackers burst out of the trees.

_Of course. Wolves._

_And none of this "oh dear" business, dear. Not that I can think of anything clever to replace it with. Oh shit; my wit has flit. Wolves!_

There were only three of them, though; more than enough to take Tumnus alone, but the unexpected challenge of three moderately trained Betans would at least slow them down. Grace and Tumnus had both loosed arrows as soon as the beasts came within range, and one arrow had hit its target: merely wounding, but another shot -- Tumnus's -- brought the wolf down whimpering. It twitched, and lay still.

"Aren't these rather _large_ wolves?" muttered Jake, and let his spear fly. It missed.

"No basis for comparison, right?" gulped Chris.

"Ah. Yes. I forgot," Jake said vaguely, reaching for another spear. Chris shot him a look, but aside from appearing admirably concentrated on killing, he was still Jake; and really one couldn't be expected to remember _no wolves on Beta, not even in the Zoo_ under these circumstances, even if one was an exobiologist in one's sleep.

Their improvised spears didn't fly true, and the wolves were getting closer. Chris grabbed the stake by its side. _Teeth will rend your skin to a sieve; claws are painful; might as well live,_ its returning wit rattled off, making its hands shake less. And then the wolf in the lead, the bigger one thank you Jake, stopped covering the ground in fierce leaps, stilled, and raised itself on its hind paws.

And spoke.

"I am Fenris Ulf. Tumnus the Faun, you are under arrest for treason against her Majesty the Queen of Narnia. Surrender or you will die."

"He does not surrender," Grace's voice rang out. Chris drew in a breath of the freshest air it had ever tasted and squared its shoulders, wanting to lay down its sword at her feet or something. _Yes, my Captain!_

"Then he will die," said Fenris Ulf. "And you with him."

 _But alas, we never do,_ Chris had time to think, and then Ulf sprang forward...

...into a plane of fire, as Grace tossed a lit candle into the pool of cooking oil she and Tumnus had poured onto a line of their top-grade winter-weight Survey jackets. The wolf screamed in pain, but it was a distraction rather than a victory, and the other wolf was smart enough to run around. And then, for the next eternity or so, all was blood and claws and hair and wickedly sharp points, and they were certain they'd lose until the moment they won, and the wolves lay dead at their feet, and they were, every one of them, alive.

Jake had sustained a nasty slash across his thigh, however, and Grace, metamorphosing from warrior to healer, had his fatigue trousers off in minutes, something Chris wouldn't have minded doing at some point in the last several years if they hadn't been colleagues and Jake depressingly fixated on women. There were compensations; apparently the thing to do after a battle was to prepare a feast, and there was nothing wrong with doing it under the direction of a hairy-legged, hairy-faced, bare-chested person who was both admirably particular in the kitchen and a deadly shot with a bow.

They put Jake in the armchair and propped his bandaged leg up, and brought him a plate of food, and took their places in chairs or on the floor, with Britta and the fire nearby. It was full dark now, and Tumnus and Grace lit candles and placed them about the room.

Jake looked up at the glowing flames, smiled and said, "We light these lights for the miracles and the wonders, for the redemption and the battles." He raised clasped hands toward the ceiling for a few seconds, and then lowered them and added, "Thank you, friends."

They chorused, "Thank you, friends," in response, sipped their wine, and started to eat with a well-deserved hunger. It was winter food: root vegetables long stored, cold-hardy greens gathered in the forest, stewed apples, potatoes sliced and fried in the small bit of remaining oil. A sweet wine for dessert, and bread toasted at the fire, served dripping with honey.

Chris sat on the floor at Britta's side and spoke quietly to her. "Darling girl," it said, hoping she heard, "we won. Not the war, just a skirmish, a medley of extemporanea, really, but it's a start. Come out and join us for the rest, hm? We could use your sort of courage, the sort that faces wormholes awake and kicking. Brave as anything. Brave as..."

It broke off. No reaction. She was pale and barely breathing. The wounds at her temples were healing, but the rest of her was broken and lifeless, and it thought she was already starting to waste away. With a last hope, it dipped its finger in the honey and touched it to her lips. They all watched as the droplet lingered and slid, and as -- the brink of a miracle -- her tongue ventured out to capture it. She swallowed; Jake gasped, and Chris glanced at him, saw him yearning to fall out of his chair, to kiss her and bring her to life. It held up a hand, halting the movement, then put its glass to Britta's mouth and gave her a few drops of wine.

Her eyes moved beneath her lids; her breath came harder, as though a fast-paced dream had seized her; Chris remembered, though it had never known the sight with seeing eyes, that this was how she looked while guiding their ship through a wormhole. Her cheeks were flushed with the nearness of the fire.

She spoke. "Warm," she said, and then more quickly, "Warm warm warm golden velvet tender, teeth claws leaping, oh flying, and the breath so warm and the stone like fire burning it living. Alive." Her eyes sprang upon, and she gazed at Chris with a look of gratitude it would never forget, and lifted a hand to touch its cheek.

"A lion," she said, sounding terrified and ecstatic and sad all at once, and then Jake fell at her side, wounded leg and all, pushing Chris aside, and took her in his arms.

Chris slept better that night than it had in years, on the stone floor of Tumnus's cave, and woke late in the morning to the joyful cry of a child in the forest, and Tumnus's elated shout of response. "Lucy! Oh, Lucy!"

**********

Commander Rosalind Davidson came back to life with her cheek pressed against cool green turf, and startled to her feet. She was standing in the shade of an enormous tree, next to a pool of still water, and she was alone.

No, not alone: standing a few meters off, so still that she hadn't noticed him, was an old man with a long white beard. "Welcome, my daughter," he said.

"I'm not your--" she began, and then straightened her stance and snapped out her name and rank. "Betan Astronomical Survey," she added. "Scientific party. Non-combatants."

"Oh, then you will wish to meet a friend of mine," he said. "But I neglected to introduce myself. I am the Hermit of the Southern March, the latest of that title. You may address me as Bradych. Please, come into my house."

"I'm not going anywhere till you tell me where I am and where my people are. What planet is this?"

The old man shook his head. "This is the Southern March. We are in Archenland, near the border of Narnia. Pray come inside," he went on, speaking as though her wits were a bit lacking. "There is food and drink."

Rosalind hesitated, but she was dreadfully thirsty and she knew better than to trust the water in the pool. She followed Bradych inside. It was cool and dim in the house, and it took her eyes a moment to adjust from the brilliant sunlight outside. He gestured her toward a long table, and as she approached it, she saw another person already seated there: a very old woman, the oldest she had ever seen. She offered a nod of respect and received a slight widening of the eyes in response.

"Welcome, my sister," the woman said; she had a clear voice for one so aged. It seemed the cultural norm here was to greet people by invented family relationships; she would have been more likely to call the woman grandmother -- and Rosalind's grandmothers were mere children by comparison -- but she gave another nod in response and sat down. Bradych returned with glasses of a pink-tinged drink and a platter of green grapes.

Rosalind sipped the cool liquid gratefully; she would have preferred to test it for toxins first, but as she'd entered the house she'd suddenly realized she was without her pack and all its equipment, as well as the weapons and comlink usually kept on her belt. And the holocube of family pictures in her pocket. She was, at least, still wearing her uniform; she stroked the sleeve to give herself some comfort.

"Commander," the woman said, nodding at the insignia. She must have been listening when Rosalind introduced herself outside.

"Yes?"

"Just noting the rank. You're young for it. Congratulations."

"Um, thank you." A militaristic society? "And you? Did you have a rank, when you, um..."

The woman smiled: like the topology of an earthquake, the wrinkles breaking and shifting. "Pilot Officer," she said. "Late of the _Richard Feynman._ "

The world went dark in front of Rosalind's eyes for a second, and she nearly spilled her drink. "But that means... that was..." She thought. "Ten years ago. That it disappeared. And you..."

"It was a very long time ago for me." She looked at Bradych, and he nodded.

"Time works differently between our worlds," he said. "So we are told. And Britta has lived far longer than most of our kind. Tell her," he added, looking at the old woman. "She ought to know."

"Part is yours to tell, cousin," said Britta... yes, Britta Phelps, that was the name. She turned back to Rosalind. "Indulge an old woman's curiosity," she said. "We are remembered, on Beta, then."

"By those you left behind, and by Survey, yes. There's a memorial plaque at Headquarters. You're not the only ones on it, of course. There have been other disappearances, since," she said, and it was a question.

Britta and Bradych looked at each other. "My fellow Coriakin played host to a geologist from Olivine," Britta said.

"And there were the two lords of Rilian's court who led such a quiet and scandalous life together. And then there was the one who tried to cheer up the Marsh-wiggles."

"Yes," said Britta, "but the foolish urge was called psychotherapy. Oh, the dear old sandbox of sanity. We were all a bit insane in Survey."

Rosalind laughed. "You have to be. I have a crew full of... oh. So they're all here somewhere, too." Britta nodded. "And... we didn't crash a shuttle, did we?"

"No. My dear... I'm sorry. You never came through that last jump; you were lost in the wormhole. You're dead. On Beta, I mean; in that world. Here, you are very much alive. Very much free, if you so wish."

Never to return home. It was devastating; it was also strangely liberating. Yes, she understood. But there'd been something in Britta's tone that made Rosalind say, "And you? Weren't you free?"

She hesitated before answering. "I was part of a great victory, which made me feel I was of worth here; and I was loved, which made me... a content prisoner. Narnia is a beautiful land, and my husband was a good man, and I had friends, though no children. And then Jake died, as humans will, and my dear Chris as well, and I wanted to die too, and... Aslan came to me, in a dream, and gave me solace, and sent me out into the heavens once more."

"Who's Aslan?" asked Rosalind, twitching away from the thrill that had raised the hairs on her arms.

"One who can make of a human being a star," said Bradych, looking at Britta in what Rosalind realized was habitual wonder.

"You were a _star?_ " Rosalind said, and somehow, crazy as the idea was, she didn't disbelieve it.

"I still am, I suppose," said Britta. "My body descended earthwards once again; my soul roams the galaxy nightly. Memories become a significant part of one's reality, at my age. And I was glad to find Bradych, glad that my cousin may give my poor body a home for the years remaining."

It was the second time she'd called him cousin. "And who are you?" Rosalind asked Bradych. "How do you fit into all this?"

He sighed. "You don't want to know."

"She needs to know. Tell her," said Britta.

"Very well," Bradych said. "I am the last of a line that should not have had a beginning. And I am a Betan too, though until I met Britta I knew nothing of that world, only that our family was scorned and cursed. My ancestors Ben Rosemont and Maria Griffiths came to Narnia on that same ship. Britta and the others were heroes in the battles that ensued, while Rosemont betrayed his fellows to the White Witch and nearly caused all their deaths, until Aslan's sacrifice saved them. He exiled himself, and Maria went with him."

"Out of love," Britta said gently. "Which he needed as much as any of us. You are not cursed, cousin. Or no more than the rest of us. We have all lost much, and gained by losing." She turned to Rosalind. "I have told him many times that Rosemont's deceit saved another from committing treachery. Even out of evil, good can come. And out of sorrow, glory."

"It's easy for you to say that," Bradych grumbled.

"Do you think so?" said Britta, with the ache of centuries behind her words. "Do you really think so?" Then she laughed, lightly, like a girl. "Oh, cousin. As my dear Chris used to say to its dear Tumnus, don't look at me in that tone of voice, hairy-face. And for Aslan's sake, cheer up. We have a guest to entertain."

She looked at Rosalind expectantly. "And the captain of your ship?" she asked. "Grace Fagan?"

"Oh, wonderful Grace! She was splendid in the battle, so splendid that Aslan..." She smiled. "Had no choice but to knight her, even while some grumbled because of her sex. Marsh-wiggles aside, Beta had its influence on Narnia. On Aslan, even."

"Good." Rosalind picked up a grape. "And you. Tell me about being a star."

"Oh," said Britta, surprised and fragile-sounding. "Oh. Well. Black velvet and fireflies. A million bells chiming, birdsong and trumpets, and all the sounds dancing together in profound mathematical patterns. Music and delight. It was like..." -- her voice faltered -- "it was like being a jump pilot."

She pushed herself to her feet, broke off a stem of grapes, and handed it to Rosalind. "Take these and come with me," she said brusquely. "Come out to the laughing trees and the silken clouds, and the green hills and the red, red earth. I want to show you your new home."

**********

The shuttle was ready; he was strapped in and prepared for take-off. He didn't want to go.

To call it a premonition, a foreboding, would be too dramatic; it would be to demean those who actually had those instincts. He was homesick already, that was all. Officers in Survey shouldn't have families. Though for thousands of years, men and women had left their homes and loved ones on voyages of discovery, proudly and unhesitatingly, though not without regret. He was just part of a long tradition.

It helped, always, to think of it that way. It made leaving less painful. As did anticipating his return.

He glanced around at his crew; they had their outward-voyage faces on. Time to find his and slap it over I-miss-you. He grinned a little, thinking of the promise ahead of them. New planets; new life. New rocks, if you were Jim over there and found those exciting. They all had so much to find.

The shuttle's engines screamed, and then they were up and away. _Further up and further in,_ he thought, not quite sure why. The view out the window showed the sky darkening as Beta's atmosphere quickly thinned. _Goodbye, my love, my children._ He wanted to wave, but it was absurd. They couldn't see him.

He turned to say something to Jim about rocks, and the world went absolutely white.

*

Annoyance woke him: an odd rasping sensation on his cheek. He was home, and little Cordelia was washing his face; she wanted him to wake up and play, but he was so tired after the last mission, and...

No. Cordelia was a big girl now; she didn't play silly tricks. What...?

He opened his eyes. The tongue quickly withdrew; the muzzle of golden fur moved far enough away for him to focus. He should have panicked, scuttled away as fast as he could. But somehow he couldn't feel the need.

It was a lovely, lovely lion.

He felt his body come alive completely. Grass under his back, his hands clutching the short blades. Blue sky and white clouds above. Beauty and joy triumphant in his heart.

The lion made a growling noise... but no, it wasn't growling. It sounded like laughter. It laughed at him, and then it spoke.

"Welcome, Captain Miles Mark Naismith, Betan Astronomical Survey. Welcome to Narnia."

**Author's Note:**

> And now I really want to write the story where Miles Vorkosigan meets Reepicheep.
> 
> Bradych's name derives from the Welsh for "betray."
> 
> One could just assume that everything witty Chris says is a Dorothy Parker quote or paraphrase, but in case you're curious: what fresh hell, uni(hetero)sexuality isn't normal, the cure for boredom (questionable attribution), time rather than wit flitting, might as well live, but alas we never do, a medley of extemporanea, don't look at me in that tone of voice.
> 
> Jake quotes the Hanerot Halalu, a hymn for Hanukkah; I wanted to give him some of his ancestors' words, but any misuse or misquoting is mine.


End file.
